Our Sponsors

The Team

Stephan Bönnemann

Floor Drees

Hannes Moser

Christoph Witzko

The Better Parts

This talk is about using programming languages more effectively, and using that experience to create and select better programming languages. There are bad practices in software development that are so old and well established that it is difficult to recognize the problems they cause. There will be a review of the new good parts in ES6. JSON will also be mentioned.

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford was born in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, but left when he was only six months old because it was just too damn cold. He turned his back on a promising career in television when he discovered computers. He has worked in learning systems, small business systems, office automation, games, interactive music, multimedia, location-based entertainment, social systems, and programming languages. He is the inventor of Tilton, the ugliest programming language that was not specifically designed to be an ugly programming language. He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He also discovered the JSON Data Interchange Format, the world’s most loved data format. And he works at Paypal.

No More Tools

As creatives we constantly search for ways to optimise and streamline workflows. Currently we’re being bombarded with more tools than ever. But how do we know that we reached a tipping point, when the apparatus we pick introduces more complexity and wastes way more time that it was supposed to save? As craftspeople, how do we maintain simplicity and learn to rely on bare-bones solutions? And more importantly—how do we empower others and collaborate?

We’ll have a look at up-to-date front-end tooling and analyse alternative approaches to compiling, building and automation processes as well as the human side of teamwork.

Karolina Szczur

Karolina is a designer, developer and photographer working with her friends at &yet. In her free time she contributes to various Open Source projects, writes and runs CSS Conf Oakland. She also owns a cat and an excessive amount of books on typography.

A Talk About Nothing

In this talk, we will explore nothing.

And, yes, literally nothing. Together we’ll take a look behind the curtains of reality and explore some of the underlying rules that shape our existence. We will dig into ancient philosophy, the history and today's status physics and maths, look into the origins of computing, programming and analyse the way we develop software today. We’ll see how nothing influences us, how it shapes our behaviour every day and how nothing can help us grow – in our professions and, even more, as humans.

“Nothing really matters,”, Freddie Mercury wrote in a song that was released 40 years ago. I want to show you how right he is.

Lena Reinhard

Lena Reinhard is a CEO, co-founder, project- and communications manager. She’s part of the Open Source Projects Hoodie and CouchDB, loves making music and enjoys going on extensive road trips. And somehow accidentally she always ends up at places where she meets Alpacas

Hacking the Human Genome

Genetics: the final frontier. What is the link between the human genome and JavaScript? Do you want to find out why your body does that weird thing? In this talk we will unravel the mystery surrounding your source code, and explore using JavaScript to make sense of it. Included with your attendance is a copy of my genome which you may use to make clones.

Eric Schoffstall

The Meaning of Words

What if we could write JavaScript programs by just mentioning words like lodash or React without having to install or require them? What if our computer is always trying to update dependencies and run tests in the background so we won’t break things? What if every module we wrote is instantly useable in our other projects?

We’re going to take a critical look at our past and present and find out what’s keeping us there. Then we’ll explore some fresh ideas from the past millennium until we get a finely distilled interface which is better at writing programs than you are. That was a joke, but one day we’ll be there and you don't want to be the one who's replaced by a computer, right?

Stephan Seidt

Stephan has had a special relationship with professional software development for 8 years. His guiding principle is inventing novel ways of writing programs using arcane knowledge (old papers) and new resources that become available. He lives & works in Munich and Berlin together with his girlfriend Alex. He’s currently co-founding a startup. One way to become his best friend is by giving him bacon pancakes.

It Takes a Village to Make a Programmer

In two parts, I’ll share the story of how I transformed into a hirable web developer in just under one year while highlighting the ways people helped me to get to that point. I hope you’ll come away with ideas how you can make a difference in your own community. As Tal Ben-Shahar says:

There is no more selfish act than a generous one.

So this talk is really for your own good.

Michele Guido

Michele hails from Long Island, New York and has lived in Berlin for the last 2 and a half years. A former teacher, she is now a Junior Developer at Sociomantic Labs. She is passionate about rock climbing, comedy, and pizza.

Ain't No Party Like a Third-Party JavaScript Party

You've got the hang of this whole client-side application development thing. Old browsers, new browsers, mobile, desktop – it's all just another day at the office for you. But now users are trying to type in your Very Important Form, and nothing is happening and you can't even reload the page; a user has reported an XSS attack that, according to your code, can't actually be happening; and, rarely but not never, your app just doesn't load at all.

Join me for a whirlwind telling of tales from the trenches of third-party JavaScript application development, where the only thing you control on a site is a single script tag, and where it's all but impossible to dream up every hostile environment in which your code will be expected to Just Work. Think you can trust the window.JSON, Array.prototype, or window.jQuery you found lying around? Think again. "It works on my machine" has never rung quite so hollow.

Rebecca Murphey

Rebecca Murphey is a staff software engineer at Bazaarvoice, where she leads the Web Apps Platform Team, with a strong focus on third-party JavaScript applications. She is a frequent speaker on the topic of code organization and best practices at various JavaScript conferences, including Front-End Ops Conf 2014, the 2014 jQuery Conference in San Diego, JSConf US 2013, JSConf US 2011, JSConf EU 2010, Full Frontal 2012, Fronteers 2012, and many others. She lives in Austin, TX, with her partner, their son, and their dog. She blogs at rmurphey.com.

How Teaching Kids Made Me a Better Developer

Kids have this magical ability to take something you think you understand well and turn it upside down within an instant. They challenge norms and ask questions that you never thought existed or could be asked.

In this talk, I’ll go over some of the challenges I faced introducing kids to the world of programming, and how their inquisitiveness changed the way I look at software development, how I learn to get better at it and what I want to do with it in the coming years.

Ramón Huidobro

I’ve been developing Mac, iOS and Web apps for five years, and loving every minute of it. In the last three years, I’ve been running the “Computer Game Programming” after school activity at my old school in Vienna where I teach kids to make games with different technologies. Currently wrapping up my Software Engineering degree at the Vienna University of Technology.

Useful Performance Metrics

Building a super-performant front-end is far harder and more intensive than making onLoad or onDomReady happen quicker — After you've removed "blocking scripts", what do you do?

In this talk I'll show you how to put best practice tools to work for you & your team.

We'll explore how to keep your pages scrolling buttery-smooth, the depths of undocumented Chrome devtool APIs, how to create your very own clean-room environment to test and measure while coordinating collection of performance metrics over many geographical borders.

Ben Schwarz

Ben is a Melbourne based web developer, speaker and event organiser. He's a director of CSSConfAU, works on CalibreApp and spends the rest his time cycling and drinking unsettling amounts of booze and coffee.

Containerized Applications with Docker

Docker’s lightweight virtualization may supplant our hypervisor-backed VMs at some point in the future, and change the way that tomorrow's applications are architected, packaged and deployed. Using Docker, your applications will sit atop an excellent platform for packing, shipping and running low-overhead, isolated execution environments. You will get a brief intro to the Docker ecosystem, get to know the tools and processes needed to create containerized Ruby applications, and learn best practices for interacting with the Docker API.

Laura Frank

Laura Frank is a developer who creates tools to make development processes simpler. She started coding after receiving a hand-me-down DOS system and has been lost in the code mines ever since. She is currently a senior software engineer at CenturyLink Labs and lives in Chicago.

Say Hello To Offline First

During the rise of the internet in the past 25 years, devices and user interactions have changed enormously. Now it’s time we find new approaches and patterns for the way we build applications for this web and its users.

Ola’s talk covers the philosophy behind and state of offline support on the web, starting points, challenges and how to develop first-class offline experiences – from localStorage, appcache to sync and database structures.

Ola Gasidlo

Ola is a front-end / JavaScript developer, core member of Team Hoodie and organiser of OpenTechSchool Dortmund. She loves making the web accessible for everyone, riding the trails and daughter-driven development.

Developing a Mindset for Web-Security

Security is often the neglected step-child of web-development. It has the reputation of being hard and complex and in general to be someone else's problem. Too often it's addressed after the project launched - or shortly before it's supposed to go live (after all, you are supposed to write bug-free software, right?).

In my talk I want to show you why it matters to bake security into your project right from the start, how to act responsibly concerning your users' data and how to develop a good understanding of fundamental security topics.

Frederic Hemberger

Frederic is a freelance web-developer from Cologne, Germany focusing on JavaScript and Node.js. During the last year he became interested in web-security and since then tries to rise awareness how developers can deal with the elephant in the room.

In his spare time, he likes to contribute to open source projects and co-hosts the local JavaScript meet-up Cologne.js.

Storytelling in Design and Engineering

When someone says "storytelling", either marketing or children bedtime stories come to mind. Both are valid, but far from being the only places storytelling appears in. They are very much a part of design and engineering communities today, but we aren’t consciously aware of them most of the time. Stories are illustrative, easily memorable and often reach us on an emotional level so we should use them to frame our communication. Let us go through some examples and see how you can use storytelling to improve leading projects, planning, hiring and changing perspectives.

Merlin Rebrović

Merlin works as an interaction designer at Google and YouTube. With a computer science degree and a few years of working as a software engineer, he shifted to design realizing that you need both design and engineering to make great products. When not building something new, Merlin can be found reading or relaxing in nature.

Mobile web apps with “native app” features

Native apps allow you to take full advantage of all the device features. The downside? You have to develop, well, native apps. That’s a steep learning curve if you are a web developer. But did you know how easy it is to access motion sensors in mobile browsers? Or that that you can access geolocation data? You can read gyroscope and accelerometer data in your web app and it is stunningly simple. In fact, so simple, that I can show you how to capture motion sensor data with just a few lines of code. We’ll also take a peek at ServiceWorker, a new feature for the web platform that lets a script persistently cache resources and handle all resource requests for an application.With ServiceWorker you can build web apps that work offline. You can use it as a basis for “background” features such as push messaging and background sync. Allowing you to build web apps with even more native features.

Franziska Hinkelmann

Franziska has a PhD in mathematics and works as software consultant for TNG Technology Consulting GmbH. She has contributed to several open source projects and has taught a Node.js workshop at the International Summer University for Women in Informatics.

Getting more Women in Open Source. Why the f*ck should we care?

A true story about Open Source, change and Rails Girls Summer of Code.

This talk is a bit of a magic trick. It will solve a problem that seems pretty unsolvable right now: Getting more women in tech. We’ve all heard of more and more women leaving the tech industry. What’s happening? How did we get here? What can we do?

I’ll tell you a true story about 33 women from all over the world: directors, photographers, PR manager, linguists and many more that wrote Open Source code for 3 months. It’s a story about role models, community - and cat gifs. With the women focussed scholarship program Rails Girls Summer of Code we are writing history in Open Source and I will tell you how it’s done. How to raise $80k, how to build a community based project, that will keep on going and how to change 33 lives.

With this talk we will go on a short adventure in the tech jungle and see what we can achieve as a community and where we are failing. How we can get more women in Open Source, instead of losing them.

And why the f*ck we should care.

Anika Lindtner

Anika Lindtner was born and raised in Berlin. Since July 2013 she works at Travis CI and runs the Travis Foundation, aiming to make Open Source even better. She manages Rails Girls Summer of Code - a three months scholarship program in Open Source - and helps over 30 women each year to change their lives.

Anika once was a poetry slam artist, a teacher and worked at an ad agency. She can also draw monsters, knit hats with pom poms and likes urban gardening.

A Credit Card Walks into a Bar

The Credit Card is over 60 years old and was invented way before the web came along, and we are paying the price for it. This notorious master of payments likes to be kidnapped, is easy to abuse, has a habit of bringing out the worst in web forms and loves to spread it's digits all over the internet.

Cristiano Betta is a long time webdev and Developer Advocate at Braintree Payments. With a passion for payments and a broad sense of humor he takes apart the worst user interactions a Credit Card provides and shows what the future of payments could look like. From web to mobile, from IoT to wearables, the future of payments are more in flux than ever before and the Credit Card is very much at the hart of it all.

Tonight We're Gonna Code Like It's 1999: Designing Responsive Emails

It's the moment you’ve been dreading: the project of redesigning all consumer facing emails AND making them responsive becomes yours. And you've heard the rumors: designing emails means coding like it’s 1999, creating tables and adding styles inline (heaven forbid!), and throwing best practices and hopes of compatibility out the window. BREATHE. In this session, I’ll help you get your emails in shape for 2015 and ready for the responsive spotlight by showing you:

Why you need a reusable, maintainable template (or three) and how to design one.

When and how to use media queries and the ever controversial !important.

How to make desktop, mobile, and web-based clients play nicely, and which ones to watch out for (sneaky devils).

Third-party tools and knowledgeable blogs that weed through the ugliness and what parts you still need to code by hand.

Jennifer Wong

No RSVP Required: Asynchronous Messaging

Asynchronous messaging provides machine-to-machine communication for microservices or any other kind of distributed architecture - and it offers much more than a simple action trigger: Parallelizing computing-heavy tasks, load testing, or migrating existing components to new services are some of the possibilities.

When a web application grows, its backend often evolves into a distributed application. Communication between components becomes crucial. Real life examples are used to illustrate when and where (not) to use asynchronous messaging and how it nicely complements a REST API. A variety of different use cases are explored, including some less obvious ones. Lessons learned from working on a web application with more than 14M users are shared, but we're also going to discuss how smaller applications can benefit from asynchronous messaging.

Kerstin Puschke

Kerstin Puschke is a software engineer living in Hamburg where she contributes to the backend of XING, a social network for business professionals with about 14 million users. She's also a co-organizer of Hamburg's awesome Ruby user group.

Code of Conduct

tl;dr Don’t be a Jerk. Be excellent.

All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at .concat() are required to agree with and act according to the following code of conduct. Organizers will enforce this code throughout the event. We are expecting cooperation from all participants to help ensuring a safe environment for everybody.

Need help? Contact us!

The Quick Version

.concat() is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Sponsors are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, sponsors should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified by a special conference shirt.

In case you can’t find a staff member or want to contact us via email or phone directly, we are always there for you:

Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel / venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.

We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.